I took this photograph behind my desk
window on a summer morning in July
The tops of the highest mountains are obscured in the morning haze
The red blossoms are wild roses

A wild rose by any other name

Among all the photographs I've taken in these mountains, I think
this is my favorite
The bumble bee looks and sounds fearsome --- but it's one of the gentlest
creatures on earth
I find comfort and nature's harmony when it buzzes around me while I tend my
flowersNow days are slow and easy, the
summer
Sighs into fall: a
purring bumble-bee
Can leave the flower, softened to a blur,
To soak in the noon sun, and fly carefree;
The night can breathe with pleasure as once more
We weave our visions into poetry
And seek to bring our thoughts under a rule,
Who are the mindful servants of the soul.
John Keats ---
http://poemshape.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/robert-frosts-the-pasture/

This is a wishing well in the grove that
separates our main yard from our wild flower field
I'm still waiting for most of my wishes to come true, but I've been blessed with
many that did come true

And this is our wild flower field with the
barn roof in the background

Here's the back of our cottage on a cloudy
day

I used this studio as an office for the
first couple of years
But after Erika's health worsened, I moved my office into house
My books and other junk are still in the studio

This is my wonderful, wonderful Polka
Weigela bush
That bloomed all of June and will bloom once again in August

This is a butterfly was alive on our
driveway but seemed unable to fly
It disappeared a few minutes later either on its own or in the mouth of a bird
I like to think it just regained the strength to fly once more amongst our many
blossoms

A view of Mt. Lafayette from our south
garden early in the spring before I planted the alysum

In front of our cottage are two large French
lilac bushes that are more aromatic than any bushes I know
The sweet aroma fills the inside of our cottage

There are also two smaller French lilac
bushes by our rock garden

I think this is an early-blooming hydrangea
bush along the border of the rear of our land abutting the golf coursePlease correct me if I incorrectly identified this as a hydrangea bush
Suzanne Williams Rautiola's expert gardener (also her husband) suspects its a
deciduous azalea
And I suspect he's much more expert than me

This is one of the old tractors belonging to
the golf course
I think it's fully depreciated but keeps on running like the Energizer Bunny

And this is one of the big blossoms on our
clematis vine in the south garden

Pamela Murphy, widow of WWII
hero and actor, Audie Murphy, died peacefully at her home on April 8, 2010.
She was the widow of the most decorated WWII hero and actor, Audie Murphy,
and established her own distinctive 35 year career working as a patient
liaison at the Sepulveda Veterans Administration hospital, treatingevery
veteran who visited the facility as if they were a VIP.

Any soldier or Marine who came
into the hospital got the same special treatment from her. She would walk
the hallways with her clipboard in hand making sure her boys got to see the
specialist they needed.

If they didn't, watch out. Her
boys weren't Medal of Honor recipients or movie stars like Audie, but that
didn't matter to Pam. They had served their country. That was good enough
for her. She never called a veteran by his first name. It was always
"Mister." Respect came with the job. "Nobody could cut through VA red tape
faster than Mrs. Murphy," said veteran Stephen Sherman, speaking for
thousands of veterans she befriended over the years. "Many times I watched
her march a veteran who had been waiting more than an hour right into the
doctor's office. She was even reprimanded a few times, but it didn't matter
to Mrs. Murphy. "Only her boys mattered. She was our angel."

Audie Murphy died broke in a
plane crash in 1971, squandering millions of dollars on gambling, bad
investments, and yes, other women. "Even with the adultery and desertion at
the end, he always remained my hero," Pam told me.

She went from a comfortable
ranch-style home in Van Nuys where she raised two sons to a small apartment
- taking a clerk's job at the nearby VA to support herself and start paying
off her faded movie star husband's debts. At first, no one knew who she was.
Soon, though, word spread through the VA that the nice woman with the
clipboard was Audie Murphy's widow. It was like saying General Patton had
just walked in the front door. Men with tears in their eyes walked up to her
and gave her a hug.

"Thank you," they said, over
and over.

The first couple of years, I
think the hugs were more for Audie's memory as a war hero. The last 30
years, they were for Pam.

One year I asked her to be the
focus of a Veteran's Day column for all the work she had done. Pam just
shook her head no.

"Honor them, not me," she
said, pointing to a group of veterans down the hallway. "They're the ones
who deserve it."

The vets disagreed. Mrs.
Murphy deserved the accolades, they said. Incredibly, in 2002, Pam's job was
going to be eliminated in budget cuts. She was considered "excess staff." "I
don't think helping cut down on veterans' complaints and showing them the
respect they deserve, should be considered excess staff," she told me.
Neither did the veterans. They went ballistic, holding a rally for her
outside the VA gates. Pretty soon, word came down from the top of the VA.
Pam Murphy was no longer considered "excess staff."

She remained working full time
at the VA until 2007 when she was 87.

"The last time she was here
was a couple of years ago for the conference we had for homeless veterans,"
said Becky James, coordinator of the VA's Veterans History Project. Pam
wanted to see if there was anything she could do to help some more of her
boys. Pam Murphy was 90 when she died last week. What a lady.

On May 14, 2006 I retired from Trinity University after a long
and wonderful career as an accounting professor in four universities. I was
generously granted "Emeritus" status by the Trustees of Trinity University. My
wife and I now live in a cottage in the White Mountains of New Hampshire ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/NHcottage/NHcottage.htm

Online Video, Slide Shows, and Audio
In the past I've provided links to various types of music and video available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm

Cleveland may be losing Lebron James, but at least the accounting faculty at
Case Western are doing their best to offset the loss
A Good Year for Case Western's Accounting Faculty ---
http://weatherhead.case.edu/

Promotions

Lee Blazey to Associate Professor

Karen Braun to Associate Professor

Julia Grant to Full Professor

Awards

Dr. Timothy Fogarty, 2010 Issues Best Paper Award, Issues in Accounting
Education, for "Blessed Are the Gatekeepers: A Longitudinal Study of the
Editorial Boards of The Accounting Review" coauthored by Chih-Hsien
(Debra) Liao (PhD, Case Western Reserve University).

Jensen Comment
I'm pleased with Case because it made a faculty
home for one of my excellent former accounting students at Trinity University
---
http://weatherhead.case.edu/research/faculty/profile.cfm?idDM=372750Yi-Jing Wu was a concert
pianist until we convinced her the future might be brighter with an accounting
PhD
She carried her tireless music work ethic into accounting

How Little Academic Achievers are Made
Who needs stark regression discontinuity to establish something that any
competent, responsible parent can tell you over a cup of Starbucks? If you're
trying to raise a well-educated, well-rounded child, you need to limit — not
increase — the time he spends on a home computer. Of course, now that there's
scientific research to prove the point, will educators and government
bureaucrats take notice?
Marybeth Hicks, "Common Sense in Education Strikes Again," Townhall, July
14, 2010 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/MarybethHicks/2010/07/14/common_sense_in_education_strikes_again

Social networking tools such as Twitter and the
emerging Google Wave web application are taking individuals and
organizations to the frontiers of real-time communication and collaboration.
The technology has the potential to make it easier to discover and share
information, interact with others, and decide what to buy or do. But the key
word is "potential": Social networking's evolution is still in its early
stages. What makes the current crop of services more promising than those
that came before? What are the obstacles to further progress?

An expert panel debated these questions at the
annual Supernova technology strategy conference, produced in partnership
with Wharton and held last winter in San Francisco. The 2010Supernova forumwill be held this month in Philadelphia.

The panel at the San Francisco event was chaired by
David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for
Internet and Society and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Appearing on
the panel were: Anna-Christina Douglas, product marketing manager at Google;
Laura Fitton, principal of Pistachio Consulting and co-author of Twitter for
Dummies; Paul Lippe, founder and CEO of Legal OnRamp; Jason Shellen, founder
and CEO of Thing Labs, and Deborah Schultz, a partner with the Altimeter
Group. In addition, Google engineers were in the room demonstrating Google
Wave by allowing the audience to post to the social networking service
during the session; their comments appeared in real time on projection
screens near the panelists.

Weinberger began the session by asking panelists
what made the introduction of social networking tools different from
previous technological endeavors to improve communication and collaboration.
One significant issue discussed was how social networking compared with
knowledge management (KM). KM systems first appeared on the scene about 20
years ago and once represented the frontier, embodying companies' most
innovative ideas for integrating internal access to disparate information in
order to improve communication, collaboration and business processes.

KM systems were implemented through technologies
such as web portals, e-mail networks, content management systems and
business intelligence infrastructure. Web portals, which were probably the
most successful type of KM system, allow users to access a range of
information -- including reports, diagrams, catalogs and maintenance records
-- through one interface, rather than many. The portals also include
external information supplied by business partners, government agencies and
news sources. The technology automatically pulls information from the
sources on demand so that users do not have to search for it manually.

Organizations employ KM systems to increase the
value of their "intellectual capital." However, the technology that supports
KM systems has traditionally been difficult to develop and deploy. And the
systems have not been universally successful at fostering real time
collaboration between employees.

According to Shellen -- who was part of the
development teams for Google's blogging program and Reader aggregator
service -- before social networking tools enabled quick and casual
communication, many bloggers in corporate organizations had "some KM tool
where you captured the knowledge in the tool's silo and assigned all sorts
of tags, folders and so on to it. You would then pass the blog to your
manager for him or her to [learn from] what you were writing." Shellen now
heads Thing Labs, a San Francisco-based company that builds web-based
software for sharing content. Social networking is easing some of the
frustration users in many organizations have encountered with traditional KM
systems. Through use of Twitter and other tools, more of the intellectual
capital that KM systems once guarded is flowing freely, in real time, inside
and outside organizations. If an employee needs to find expertise or share
information, he or she doesn't have to work within the rigid confines of a
KM system, or even the confines of his or her organization. Instead, the
employee can use social media to collaborate with others and to find answers
more quickly and put relevant advice into practice.

While there are virtues to being able to
communicate faster and more easily with social networking tools, panelists
agreed that many organizations are struggling to adjust to the spontaneity
and loss of control over information that comes with these tools. Concerned
that organizations will eventually clamp down, Weinberger asked, "Will all
the fun be stripped out of it? Will people become afraid to Tweet about
things that are not strictly business-related?" Fitton, whose consulting
firm focuses on helping companies to use micro-blogging in a business
environment, suggested that companies may find the "messy and random
serendipity" of Twitter and other social networks to be more efficient than
lumbering KM systems and processes. "It brings an infusion of humanity to
business," she noted, who adding that, in her experiences at Pistachio
Consulting, she has observed social networking having an impact on
organizations by leveling management hierarchies, accelerating team-building
across geographical locations, and improving mentoring. She stated that, in
some cases, research to find human expertise that used to take many hours
can happen much faster when queries are "flung out into the commons" to
catch the attention of people who can provide answers more quickly.

Breadth vs. Depth

One of the advantages social networking tools have
over KM systems, experts say, is that they simplify the process of obtaining
information that would be useful to a business or employee. Tools such as
Twitter provide a sort of "KM in the cloud," allowing users to collaborate
with each other and send messages to locate expertise without a company
having to build and maintain a complex and expensive system to provide these
capabilities internally. Social networking tools provide access to a broad
population and employ simple, standardized, techniques to link users to
information. But while social networking offers "an enormous amount of
horizontal power," Lippe said, "most of the hard collaboration problems are
[solved] in vertical domains." His firm, Legal OnRamp, is a collaboration
platform for lawyers that allows information to be collected and shared
virtually. Membership is by invitation only.

Lippe noted that, in the legal field, "there's
already a structure of knowledge, and most knowledge repositories and
structures of the collaborative web have existed for multiple generations.
So, the question is, how do you tap into them?" One core structure is
attorney-client privilege, which Lippe said "has long preceded the
information confidentiality and security regime that we all have now. It
creates the structure of what you can and cannot share." In the legal
universe, he added, the messy serendipity of "horizontal" social networking
cannot solve the hardest problems. "Lawyers have some questions they will
answer for free, and others that they will figure out a way to get paid to
answer."

But the legal field's communication sensitivities
are "a very specific case," Shellen pointed out. He noted that companies
have built private social networks that feature protected blogs and search
engines, and that these tools have proven effective in achieving new forms
of collaboration while keeping information secure. Organizations are now
incorporating use of Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other social media into
their daily routines, although they are in need of systems that can
integrate and update the information being posted across all of the
platforms. Shellen's Thing Labs produces a reader called "Brizzly" that can
be used to provide that service.

Lippe agreed that, despite the concerns he noted,
large legal firms have an opportunity to use social networking to
reestablish an intimacy with clients that they may have lost as the
businesses grew larger and adjusted to structural changes in the industry.
Lippe wrote recently on his Legal OnRamp blog that social networking tools
can be used to save attorneys from "e-mail and attachment overload" and to
"share existing knowledge or collaborate on new work [including] high volume
work like commercial contracts and high complexity work like major case
litigation."

Office culture plays a significant role in what
platform is used to share information, according to Schultz, a partner with
the San Mateo, Calif.-based Altimeter Group, a technology strategy
consulting firm. She noted that media companies, for example, may be a
better fit for the horizontal nature of social networking. Schultz has been
active in social media and networking for many years and has advised
organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 50 companies, including
Citibank and Procter & Gamble. At P&G, she built the P&G Social Media Lab, a
program that enables the company to study the new dynamics of customer
relationships in the age of social networking, and to use social media to
break the mold of standard marketing measures and approaches that were
geared toward older types of media. By encouraging brand managers to pay
close attention to what customers were saying on community sites and other
social networking places, Schultz said the Lab has helped P&G redefine how
it engages, communicates with and uses marketing to influence consumers. "I
see the tools making the roles we have more porous," she stated. "As the
consumer-driven nature of social networking moves into organizations, the
collaboration potential of their use becomes more interesting."

The use of tools like Twitter and Google Wave
"definitely make a cultural statement," said Douglas. The Google product
marketing manager described how Google Wave has the capabilities for
real-time, rolling conversation and collaboration among users that can
include messages, links and attachments. Douglas noted that each
conversation or "wave" can be modified with different editing and replying
privileges so that enterprises can "exercise controls for how people want to
lock down content." The Google engineers demonstrated the application on the
big screen behind the panelists; they showed how users can comment with
links embedded in their messages and also load attachments.

Google Wave could be used effectively for private
communication inside the firewall, as well as for working with a diverse
community outside an organization, panelists said. Previous KM systems did
not easily integrate communication with content management, making it
difficult to use existing tools to access and manage information during real
time conversations. Google Wave and other social networking tools offer the
potential of a much tighter integration between communication and content,
meaning conversations can include richer information sharing and easier
references to content available across the organization.

To Shellen, the most interesting aspect to how
social networking and collaboration tools are used is users' ability to join
ongoing conversations. He said his firm is currently building a "data set on
top of that engagement, where we ask people to explain trending topics on
Twitter." The combination of immediate updates plus access to more in-depth
information can enhance knowledge. "Tools like Twitter make me much smarter
about you," Schultz noted. "And the 'you' could be an entity or an
individual." She said that with the right kind of filtering, people can
collaborate and make more effective use of the information available on
social networks. "Companies can collaborate in real time with customers on
products and even pricing."

But does the 140-character limit for posts to
Twitter enable engagement, or is it "a sign of triviality?" asked
Weinberger. "Constraints breed invention," replied Shellen. Douglas added
that communities using Twitter, Google Wave and other tools are creating
their own etiquette. Panelists agreed that both the creation of etiquette
for particular conversations and the sheer ability to engage in several
discussions at once would be difficult using blogs and older forms of web
content sharing programs.

An Open and Vibrant World

Weinberger asked the panelists whether progress
toward the real-time collaboration frontier is being driven by new
technology or human needs. Speaking to the human needs, Fitton observed that
social networking tools such as Twitter "help us overcome human isolation in
a way that is not brand new but is happening on a different scale." She said
that the collaboration possible on the site is a question of "not just;
'What are you doing?' but, 'What do we have in common?'" Fulfilling that
need is what fascinates her about the phenomenon. Shellen added: "There's
accountability behind it; we now have modes of identity tied to short bursts
of communication that are very much 'you.'"

Schultz suggested that businesses could have
achieved some of the same communications with earlier technology, "but not
in real time, and not with the ability to participate using a device [such
as a smartphone] we can take along with us in our pocket." The ubiquity of
smartphones and Internet access is changing the opportunities available to
people. "Interactivity used to be about clicking on a website, but it turns
out that was pretty passive," she said. "We are now living up to what we
said could be done." That includes the potential for much richer customer
communication that can offer links and embedded content as part of real-time
conversations. "Active" dialogue between consumers and companies using
social media, she added, break through the limits of traditional marketing,
which relies on one-way communication and canned messaging.

To Douglas, what's important is that the technology
is allowing communication, collaboration and content sharing to become one
and the same. "These tools bring human delight by breaking down barriers."
Lippe cautioned that the notion of someone Tweeting to get an answer in a
legal setting is "fairly mind-boggling." However, he agreed with the
panelists that, even in the most vertically oriented industries, "the
incredibly open and vibrant world represented by the social networking
community" will be a catalyst for dynamic changes in the years to come.

When most people hear the word "budget," they groan
about all the numbers and spreadsheets involved in setting financial goals.
Instead they procrastinate and continue spending without any specific
savings goals. Case in point: I recently postponed a meeting with my
financial planner because I didn't have the energy after a long business
trip to work through my finances.

Now Mint.com, a website that already offers
user-friendly options for studying how one's money is spent, has introduced
an easy way to set budget objectives, link them to accounts and learn
specific steps on how to reach those goals. The goals can even be
personalized with digital photos, like an image of the car you're saving up
to buy. And this service, which launched Tuesday, doesn't cost a cent.

I've been testing Intuit Inc.'s free, updated
Mint.com service, specifically focusing on its new Mint Goals feature. The
idea of adding goals that tie into real accounts has been a long time coming
for the finance-management website. Mint previously offered a Planning
section on its site, but it required too much manual input, including
setting up personal budget categories, and guesswork about how much one
should spend.

The Goals feature uses pop-up windows where users
can quickly input data, like annual salary, to get estimates on how much
they can afford to spend on things like a vacation, as well as how much they
need to save for that vacation. Monthly savings estimates can be set to
aggressive savings plans or conservative ones with just a mouse click.

Finances in One Place
Mint.com has been around for almost three years and is already used by
millions of people. Its proprietary algorithms encrypt data so people will
feel confident enough to input their usernames and passwords for their
online financial accounts, allowing them to see all of their financial
activity in one place. These accounts include those tied to credit cards,
banks, retirement savings and others. Mint is known for displaying colorful
visuals like pie charts and graphs, so it's easy for people to see where
they're spending their money or how it's being invested.

Mint Goals is a new tab on the Mint.com site, and
clicking on it directs users to a group of eight popular goals and one that
can be customized (more will be added over time). The preset list includes
goals to get out of debt, buy a home, buy a car, save for college, take a
trip or save for retirement. A digital checklist in each goal called "Next
Steps" gives people serious, doable tasks to complete, so they can actually
make progress toward a goal in ways other than just putting money aside.
This instant gratification saved me from doing a lot of calculating.

The Best Account
When you set up a goal for the first time, Mint suggests what type of
account would work best for saving toward it. Examples include a 529 savings
plan for people who are saving to put their kids through college or a Roth
IRA for retirement savings. Mint will also tell you the provider with the
best interest rate.

Unlike some other websites that encourage saving,
like SmartyPig.com, Mint isn't a bank, so you'll have to leave the Mint site
to create accounts and manage money transfers rather than starting them
right on the site. Aaron Patzer, the company's founder and CEO, expects the
site will enable setting up savings accounts and money transfers by the end
of this year.

Each goal includes the overall amount of money
intended to be saved, today's balance, planned and projected dates for
reaching the goal and how much has been saved this month (like $200 of
$750). I liked looking at Mint's colorful thermometers, which quickly showed
me how I was progressing in a particular goal.

For example, the Buy a Home goal checklist includes
steps like finding a Realtor, getting homeowner's insurance and getting
prequalified for a loan. A panel beside each of these items also offers an
educational explanation of what these steps really mean. Many explanations
include links to a blog called MintLife, where blog posts from Mint
employees and some freelancers offer deep explanations about financial
questions.

Ads With Context
The Goals feature comes with contextual ads, which help it remain free. One
checklist item suggests opening a high-yield savings account and also offers
links to the Discover and American Express websites, which offer the
accounts. If you've started a Mint Goal to save for a trip to Iceland,
travel insurance is suggested, along with Web links to sites that sell trip
insurance.

While these links might allow people to get started
right away on a particular task, they also beg the question of whether these
are the best options for users—or just the biggest advertisers on Mint. Mr.
Patzer explained that companies for these ads are chosen according to what's
best for the user and are selected from a list of savings options ranked by
the site's editors.

Goals can be linked to several of your accounts on
Mint so they're updated with real-time data. A long-term retirement goal can
link to a 401(k), brokerage account and retirement account. If the stock
market takes a dive and money is lost in an account, that loss is
automatically reflected in the overall goal's balance. If you tie a savings
account to a goal to save for a house, every dollar added to that account
(on the bank's end) is automatically reflected in the goal.

Mint already gave people a visually engaging way to
know more about what their money is doing, but Mint Goals give people a real
reason to come back to the site more often.

I'm sure my reactions contain thoughts that will
piss off everyone …. just remember that
I may be wrong.

Gut Reactions:

--This is Very Smart for Blackboard: The
future of the LMS involves knitting together various functions. Synchronous
meetings, presence awareness, and voice-authoring/collaboration are all
essential pieces of the online/hybrid learning experience. The danger for
Blackboard is that their core product becomes essentially middleware -
performing commodity functions such as enrollment management, gradebook,
etc. etc. Tying the higher value-add services directly into the Blackboard
product (as will happen over time) makes it more difficult to replace
Blackboard with another LMS.

--Elluminate Needs Development: I have
utilized Elluminate for Webinars, and I have to say that I find the platform
lacking as compared to Adobe Connect Pro. Others will disagree - but
whatever your synchronous collaboration tool preference I think you will
agree that all the platforms need significant investment. I wonder how much
better Elluminate will be than Adobe Connect Pro, particularly when the
Adobe product is integrated with Blackboard using the building block. Even
though I've never been wild about Elluminate, I think that the tool offers a
quantum leap of functionality over the atrocious native Blackboard
synchronous tools - and if Blackboard is smart they will quickly fold this
Elluminate into their core offering.

--Wimba Voice/Chat Features Are Great: I've
never quite understood why it was necessary to buy key voice and chat
(presence awareness) tools on top of the LMS - but I think Wimba has been
fulfilling an important need. If I were Blackboard I'd also integrate the
Wimba features into the core - and make the money with services,
integration, etc. etc.

--Bad News for Non-Blackboard Wimba and
Elluminate Clients: I can't see how I'd be happy with this news if I'm
running Moodle and Wimba or Elluminate. Ray is someone I trust - so his
assurances that investments will be made to support and grow the products
for non-Blackboard clients do carry a great deal of weight. Still … if I
were a Moodle person I'd be reviewing my options about now.

--If You Are Worried About Lock-In, You Should
Be: And you should be worried about lock-in, as it will be even more
difficult to leave Blackboard once the core tool is also providing
synchronous meetings and rich collaboration / student authoring functions.
Many campuses will like the pre-baked integration and robust features that
the eventual fully integrated products will deliver. Others will (wisely)
decide to piece together open-source and consumer tools, leaving themselves
with agility and flexibility.

--Kaltura or ShareStream or Ensemble Are Next:
The big piece that is missing from Blackboard now is a way to do curricular
media management. The Kaltura and ShareStream already offer robust
Blackboard integration - wouldn't it make more sense from Blackboard's
perspective if they could offer a full vertical solution - one sales cycle,
one support model, one source for integration and localization?

--Good News for Blackboard Campuses (I Think):
Overall, my gut tells me that this is good news for Blackboard campuses - as
synchronous learning and collaboration will improve (I think) with both
integration and focused resources. Getting rid of the need to have separate
sales teams and back-offices, and combining developer resources, will mean
more dollars and time can be spent on improving functionality. I'm also
worried about lock-in, but perhaps more excited about the robust and
seamless experience.

I'd also say this is good news for our industry. If
I were working at Blackboard this is exactly the deal that I would have
tried to arrange. This deal puts Blackboard in a very strong position in
terms of their long-term relevance in higher ed, and I think addresses much
of the risk that open/community source alternatives like Moodle were
beginning to pose. I also believe that within 3 years time Blackboard will
be acquired by Microsoft or Oracle or maybe even Google - as the education
market will only grow. This acquisition will be seen as a smart move along
the road to that destination.

Well, I come from a much different experience. I
have taught with Elluminte for three years now and have been quite satisfied
with the technology. We also have used Blackboard for the same period and I
consider it a major disaster and I would love to drive a stake through it
heart, if it has one. So, let's see how badly Blackboard can screw up
Elluminate.

For example, currently, Blackboard is the only LMS
that we have researched that still uses Java. This has caused a nightmare
for our faculty and students because Blackboard never works with the latest
Java implementations. So many faculty and students have automatic updates
set up and if they do, Blackboard stops working as soon as they update their
Java. One of our faculty accidently hit the Java update icon one day before
class and it took our tech people 30 minutes to get him back up and running.

I do use the Elluminate link in Blackboard, but it
takes a five-page handout that involves things like clearing cookies and
other things in your browers as well and tinkering with security settings in
your browser to work. This is a mess because we have students scattered all
over Northern New Mexico that do not have the experience to start resetting
their browser security settings.

Finally, in New Mexico, our implementation of
Blackboard has been highly unreliable and is down nearly every week. For
example, Blackboard is currently doing an "upgrade" to try to make their
platform more reliable. They estimated a day downtime. They have been down
for three days, have lost three weeks of data in the process, and still
can't get our classes to list right. All while we are trying to teach summer
classes.

From my experience, Blackboard is a disaster and
needs to die. I have had very few problems with Elluminate, but I my
teaching approach is pretty simple and I don't use many of the features.
However, if Blackboard gets a hold of it, I am sure they will mess it up.

I need to retire fast. We already have lost one
accounting faculty member who tossed in the towel over Blackboard and quite
teaching. The rest of our Business Faculty would love to corner a Blackboard
representative and give them an earfull. In fact, I had a Blackboard VP in
my office a couple of months ago (I actually am known by name at their
headquarters), along with another accounting faculty member. I commented
that if I stuck my head out my door and shouted that there was a Blackboard
representative present, I could not guarantee that she would make it out of
the building alive. Our experience with Blackboard has been horrible with
massive downtime and lost class time. Some students have left because of it
and most think we are a joke as a University because of it.

Sorry to rant, but this scares the hell out of me.
I do agree it is a smart move for Blackboard. They are using their size and
market power to drive everyone else out of the market so they can continue
to turn out and sell inferior software. The Microsoft of learning platforms.

Wall Street has made a bundle on the rapid growth
of for-profit higher education. But some sophisticated money managers are
now betting against those companies in the stock market, and the influence
of big money and related questionable behavior is clouding a debate about
the industry on Capitol Hill.

Last week, ProPublica reported that an unnamed
investment company paid a researcher to draft a letter to the Department of
Education about for-profit recruiters targeting potential students at
homeless shelters. The researcher, who solicited signatures from officials
at 20 homeless shelters, some of whom had no direct knowledge of for-profit
recruiting, later admitted she was working for a short-seller who has a
stake in a drop in value of the for-profits' stocks.

The whole for-profit-college sector earned
$26-billion in revenue last year, and the industry's earnings have made it a
darling of Wall Street. Investors pay rapt attention to news reports and
rumors about for-profit companies, which are facing possible new federal
regulations. And ironically, investor money—the free market that helped fuel
the sector's emergence—is also the motivator behind some of its loudest
critics.

In addition to the investment company behind the
homeless-recruiting letter, two other prominent short-sellers have actively
lobbied the federal government to crack down on for-profit colleges. The
money managers are relatively new players in the high-stakes policy debate.
And the Career College Association says short-sellers have engaged in a
systematic campaign to discredit its industry.

For-profit colleges have their own vested interest
in the fight over regulations and have gone on a recent spending frenzy on
lawyers and lobbyists. With so much money tainting the continuing debate,
several college-finance experts say lawmakers should not rely on facts and
figures about for-profits that come from short-sellers or the industry
itself.

Mark Kantrowitz, who runs Finaid, a Web site that
provides student financial-aid information, said policy decisions should be
based on information from the Government Accountability Office or another
unbiased source. "What you need are facts that are raw, not slanted," he
says.

Battleground Stocks Steven Eisman, a hedge fund
manager, made a splash with his testimony at a high-profile hearing in the
U.S. Senate last month on for-profits. Mr. Eisman had famously bet against
the housing market, and at the hearing he compared the growth and practices
of career colleges to those of the subprime mortgage industry.

The share prices of major for-profit companies took
a hit after Mr. Eisman's June 24 testimony, as they did after a similar
speech he gave at an investors' conference in May. Shares of ITT Educational
Services, for example, fell 4.5 percent after the hearing, and Apollo Inc.,
which owns the University of Phoenix, dropped 3.7 percent.

Those were hardly isolated events. Hedge funds have
driven much of the volatility in for-profits stocks, with many dumping their
holdings or selling short in recent months. And Trace A. Urdan, an analyst
with Signal Hill Capital Group, said Wall Street firms use "leaks and
access" in Washington to angle for their interests. Employees of investment
companies have been regular fixtures on the Hill in recent weeks.

"This feels like some weird distillation of insider
trading," said Mr. Urdan, whose group helps education companies raise
capital, and who advises investors on buying and selling education stocks.

Mr. Eisman's testimony was controversial even
before he sat in front of the microphone. But scrutiny of his role has
increased in the wake of the ProPublica report. In an interview with The
Chronicle, Mr. Eisman said he had no involvement with the researcher who
created the homeless-recruiting letter. "That was not me," he said.

During the hearing, Mr. Eisman acknowledged that he
had a financial stake in the industry's fortunes.

"I have been completely transparent about how I
short those stocks," he said Tuesday. "I wasn't trying to manipulate
anybody."

Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, brought Mr.
Eisman to the Hill. A senior Republican aide called that invitation "an
appalling lack of judgment." And while the aide said senators on both sides
of the aisle were concerned about how for-profits operate, Mr. Eisman
"wasn't there as a dispassionate truth-teller, he was there to make a quick
buck."

An aide in Senator Harkin's office defended the
invitation, saying that Mr. Eisman's testimony advanced the public's
interest. The aide also said that Mr. Eisman is a "well-respected analyst
with a track record for making unpopular, but correct, observations about
American industries."

The senator continues to cite Mr. Eisman's
arguments. In an op-ed published in Tuesday's Los Angeles Times, Senator
Harkin quotes the hedge-fund manager and uses his widely cited claim that
students enrolled in for-profit colleges could default on as much as
$275-billion in federal loans over the next decade.

The Profit Motive There is a surreal quality to
for-profits criticizing the financial motivations of short-sellers; the
quest for profits is a defining characteristic of the for-profit industry.

The difference between short-sellers and legitimate
critics of the practices of some for-profit colleges, said Harris N. Miller,
president of the Career College Association, is that for the money managers,
"it's in their best interest to distort and mislead."

Mr. Miller. who wrote a 13-page rebuttal to Mr.
Eisman's testimony, said facts often do not back the claims of Mr. Eisman
and other short-sellers, like Manuel P. Asensio, who, through the Alliance
for Economic Stability, a nonprofit advocacy group he manages, has called
for stronger regulations of for-profit colleges.

It’s common for many at research universities to
say that just because they value scholarly production doesn’t mean they
don’t care about teaching. But a new study of political science departments
at doctoral institutions -- published in the journal PS -- suggests that
there may be a tradeoff.

The study examined 122 departments at universities
that grant doctorates in political science to see which institutions offer a
course for doctoral students on how to become good teachers. It turns out
that only a minority of departments (41) do so -- even though the American
Political Science Association and others have urged graduate programs to
recognize that the odds favor their students finding jobs at institutions
that place at least as much value on teaching as on research. Of the 41
programs with courses, 28 are required and the rest are optional.

The analysis then tried to determine which programs
were most likely to offer these courses. The size of the department and the
size of the universities -- both of which could be thought to measure the
resources available for courses -- were found not to be factors.

But there was an inverse relationship between
research productivity in departments and the odds of offering such a course.
The relationship, while significant, had notable exceptions in the survey
among public but not among private institutions. Some of the public
institutions with strong research records -- such as Ohio State University,
the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin at
Madison -- do have such courses. But as a general rule, highly ranked
private university departments do not.

Over all, public institutions were seven times more
likely than private institutions to offer such courses, the study found,
citing as a possible explanation “the public service component of state
institutions or the fact that public institutions are consistently faced
with state-mandated programs to enhance teaching generally.”

The study notes that there are innovations that go
beyond just having a single course on teaching techniques. For example,
Baylor University, in its relatively young doctoral program in political
science, has placed an emphasis on the idea that it is training future
college teachers with a “teaching apprentice” program. In this program, grad
students are assigned to work with senior professors teaching an
undergraduate course -- not by becoming teaching assistants, but by
analyzing the course. The grad students prepare an annotated syllabus --
different from the syllabus used -- to explore various teaching issues.

During the fourth year of the program, the grad
students are “instructors of record” for a course, but then in their fifth
year they shift to a focus on finishing dissertations. The study suggests
that this approach provides in-depth exposure to teaching issues.

The paper on these issues was written by a professor (John Ishiyama)
and two doctoral students (Tom Miles and Christine Balarezo) at the
University of North Texas.

Does the public understand how political science
works? Or are political scientists the ones who need re-educating? Those
questions have been running through my mind in light of the drubbing that
John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt received in the American news media
for their 2007 book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). Pick your periodical — The Economist,
Foreign Affairs, The Nation, National Review, The New Republic, The New York
Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book World — and you'll find a
reviewer trashing the book.

From a political-science perspective, what's
interesting about those reviews is that they are largely grounded in
methodological critiques — which rarely break into the public sphere.
What's disturbing is that the methodologies used in The Israel Lobby and
U.S. Foreign Policy are hardly unique to Mearsheimer and Walt. Are the
indictments of their book overblown, or do they expose the methodological
flaws of the discipline in general?

The most persistent public criticism of Mearsheimer
and Walt has been their failure to empirically buttress their argument with
interviews. Writing in the Times Book Review, Leslie H. Gelb,
president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, criticized their
"writing on this sensitive topic without doing extensive interviews with the
lobbyists and the lobbied." David Brooks, a columnist for The New York
Times, recently seconded that notion: "If you try to write about
politics without interviewing policy makers, you'll wind up spewing all
sorts of nonsense."

That kind of critique has a long pedigree. For
decades public officials and commentators have decried the failure of social
scientists to engage more deeply with the objects of their studies.
Secretary of State Dean Acheson once objected to being treated as a
"dependent variable." The New Republic ran a cover story in 1999 with the
subhead, "When Did Political Science Forget About Politics?"

To the general reader, such critiques must sound
damning. International-relations scholars know full well, however, that
innumerable peer-reviewed articles and university-press books utilize the
same kind of empirical sources that appear in The Israel Lobby. Most
case studies in international relations rely on news-conference transcripts,
official documents, newspaper reportage, think-tank analyses, other
scholarly works, etc. It is not that political scientists never interview
policy makers — they do (and Mearsheimer and Walt aver that they have as
well). However, with a few splendid exceptions, interviews are not the bread
and butter of most international-relations scholarship. (This kind of
fieldwork is much more common in comparative politics.)

Indeed, the claim that political scientists can't
write about policy without talking to policy makers borders on the absurd.
The first rule about policy makers is that they always have agendas — even
in interviews with social scientists. That does not mean that those with
power lie. It does mean that they may not be completely candid in outlining
motives and constraints. One would expect that to be particularly true about
such "a sensitive topic."

Further, most empirical work in political science
is concerned with actions, not words. How much aid has the United States
disbursed to Israel? How did members of Congress vote on the issue? Without
talking to members of Congress, thousands of Congressional scholars study
how the legislative branch acts, by analyzing verifiable actions or words —
votes, speeches, committee hearings, and testimony. Statistical approaches
allow political scientists to test hypotheses through regression analysis.
By Brooks's criteria, any political analysis of, say, 19th-century policy
decisions would be pointless, since all the relevant players are dead.

Other methodological critiques are more difficult
to dismiss. Walter Russell Mead's dissection of The Israel Lobby in Foreign
Affairs does not pull any punches. Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on
Foreign Relations, wrote that Mearsheimer and Walt "claim the clarity and
authority of rigorous logic, but their methods are loose and rhetorical.
This singularly unhappy marriage — between the pretensions of serious
political analysis and the standards of the casual op-ed — both undercuts
the case they wish to make and gives much of the book a disagreeably
disingenuous tone."

Mead enumerates several methodological sins, in
particular the imprecise manner in which the "Israel Lobby" is defined in
the book. For their part, the book's authors acknowledge that the term is
"somewhat misleading," conceding that "the boundaries of the Israel Lobby
cannot be identified precisely." It is certainly true that many of the
central concepts in international-relations theory — like "power" or
"regime" — have disputed definitions. But most political scientists deal
with nebulous concepts by explicitly offering their own definition to guide
their research. Even if others disagree, at least the definition is
transparent. In The Israel Lobby, however, Mearsheimer and Walt essentially
rely on a Potter Stewart definition of the lobby: They know it when they see
it. That makes it exceedingly difficult for other political scientists to
test or falsify their hypotheses.

Many of the reviews of the book highlight two flaws
that, disturbingly, are more pervasive in academic political science. The
first is the failure to compare the case in question to other cases. For
example, Mearsheimer and Walt go to great lengths to outline the
"extraordinary material aid and diplomatic support" the United States
provides to Israel. What they do not do, however, is systematically compare
Israel to similarly situated countries to determine if the U.S.-Israeli
relationship really is unique. An alternative, strategic explanation would
posit that Israel falls into a small set of countries: longstanding allies
bordering one or multiple enduring rivals. The category of states that meet
that criteria throughout the time period analyzed by Mearsheimer and Walt is
relatively small: Pakistan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Turkey. Compared to
that smaller set of countries, the U.S. relationship with Israel does not
look anomalous. The United States has demonstrated a willingness to expend
blood, treasure, or diplomatic capital to ensure the security of all of
those countries — despite the wide variance in the strength of each's
"lobby."

Continued in article

Daniel W. Drezner is an associate professor of international politics
at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

Jensen Comment
When I read the above review entitled "Metholological Confusion" I kept
thinking of the thousands of empirical and analytical studies by accounting
faculty and students that have similar methodology confusions. How many
mathematical/empirical database studies relating accounting events (e.g., a new
standard) with capital market behavior also conduct formal interviews with
investors, analysts, fund managers, etc. Do analytical researchers conduct
formal interviews with real-world decision makers before building their
mathematical models? The majority of behavioral accounting studies conducted by
professors use students as surrogates for real-world decision makers. This
methodology is notoriously flawed and could be helped if the researchers had
also interviewed real-world players.

And Drezner overlooked another common flaw shared by both political science
and
accountics research. If the findings are as important as claimed by
authors, why aren't other researchers frantically trying to replicate the
results? The lack
of replication in accounting science (accountics research) is scandalous
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#Replication
Formal and well-crafted interviews with important players (investors, standard
setters, CEOs, etc.) constitute possible ways of replicating empirical and
analytical findings.

The closest things we have to in-depth contact with real world players in
accounting research is research conducted by the standard setters themselves
such as the FASB, the IASB, the GASB, etc. Sometimes these are interviews,
although more often then not they are comment letters. But accountics
researchers wave off such research as anecdotal and seldom even quote the public
archives of such interviews and comments. Surveys are frequently published but
these tend to be relegated to less prestigious academic research journals and
practitioner journals.

Most importantly of all in accountics is that the leading accounting research
journals for tenure, promotion, and performance evaluation in academe are
devoted to accountics paper. Normative methods, case studies, and interviews are
rarely used in studies published in such journals. The following is a quotation
from “An Analysis of the Evolution of Research Contributions by The Accounting
Review (TAR): 1926-2005,” by Jean L. Heck and Robert E. Jensen, Accounting
Historians Journal, Volume 34, No. 2, December 2007, Page 121.

Leading accounting
professors lamented TAR’s preference for rigor over relevancy [Zeff,
1978; Lee, 1997; and Williams, 1985 and 2003]. Sundem [1987] provides
revealing information about the changed perceptions of authors, almost
entirely from academe, who submitted manuscripts for review between June
1982 and May 1986. Among the 1,148 submissions, only 39 used archival
(history) methods; 34 of those submissions were rejected.
Another 34
submissions used survey methods; 33 of those were rejected.And 100 submissions
used traditional normative (deductive) methods with 85 of those being
rejected. Except for
a small set of 28 manuscripts classified as using “other” methods
(mainly descriptive empirical according to Sundem), the remaining larger
subset of submitted manuscripts used methods that Sundem [1987, p. 199]
classified these as follows:

292 General Empirical

172 Behavioral

135 Analytical modeling

119 Capital Market

97 Economic modeling

40 Statistical modeling

29 Simulation

It is clear that by
1982, accounting researchers realized that having mathematical or
statistical analysis in TAR submissions made accountics virtually a
necessary, albeit not sufficient, condition for acceptance for
publication. It became increasingly difficult for a single editor to
have expertise in all of the above methods. In the late 1960s, editorial
decisions on publication shifted from the TAR editor alone to the TAR
editor in conjunction with specialized referees and eventually associate
editors [Flesher, 1991, p. 167]. Fleming et al. [2000, p. 45] wrote the
following:

The big change was in
research methods. Modeling and empirical methods became prominent during
1966-1985, with analytical modeling and general empirical methods
leading the way. Although used to a surprising extent, deductive-type
methods declined in popularity, especially in the second half of the
1966-1985 period.

I think the emphasis highlighted in red above demonstrates
that "Methodological Confusion" reigns supreme in accounting science as well as
political science.

A couple of years ago, P. Kothari, one of the
Editors of JAE and a full professor at MIT, visited the U. of Maryland to
present a paper. In my private discussion with him, I asked him to identify
what he considered to the settled findings associated with the last 30
years of capital markets research in accounting. I pointed out that
somewhere over half of all accounting research since Ball and Brown fit into
this category and I was curious as to what the effort had added to Ball and
Brown. That is, what conclusions have been drawn that could be considered
settled ground so that researchers could move on to other topics. His
response, and I quote, was "I understand your point, Jim." He could not
identify one issue that researchers had been able to "put to bed" after all
that effort.

P. Kothari's response is to be expected. I have had
similar responses from at least two ex-editors of TAR; how appropriate a TLA!
But who wants to bell the cats (or call off the naked emperors' bluff)?
Accounting academia knows which side of the bread is buttered.

That you needed to flaunt Kothari's resume to
legitimise his vacuous response shows the pathetic state of accounting
academia.

If accounting academia is not to be reduced to the
laughing stock of accounting practice, we better start listening to the
problems that practice faces. How else can we understand what we profess to
"research"? We accounting academics have been circling our wagons too long
as a ploy to keep our wages arbitrarily high.

In as much as we are a profession, any academic on
such a committee reduces the whole exercise to a farce.

Bob Jensen wrote:
The troubles with multiple regression and discriminant analysis models
are those nagging assumptions of linearity, predictor variable
independence, homoscedasticity, and independence of error terms. If we
move up to non-linear models, the assumption of robustness is a giant
leap in faith. And superimposed on all of this is the assumption of
stationarity needed to have any confidence in extrapolations from past
experience.

In the end, if gaming is allowed in the future as
it has been allowed by bankers and their auditors for decades, putting
accountics into the standards is not the answer.

Sophisticated accountics is just perfume sprayed on
the manure pile.

Amy Dunbar comment/questions: Oh my, what a
metaphor. ;-)

I continue to struggle with the dismissal of
econometric analysis (accountics?) as an approach to address accounting
issues. Many disciplines use econometric analysis in research, despite the
limitations you point out. What research methods do you think are
appropriate for studying accounting issues? In my opinion, research requires
a disciplined approach that can be replicated, which you argue is crucial.
Can one replicate research using the research methods that you favor? Or
perhaps I am misunderstanding your points.

For example, consider the FIN 48 tax disclosures.
My coauthors and I have collected data from the tax footnotes of300
companies to determine how firms are handling the FIN 48 21d requirement of
forecasting the expected tax reserve change over the next 12 months. We want
to know how accurate forecasts are and if the forecast errors result because
of the inherent difficulty of providing the forecast or if firms do not want
to disclose because they do not want to provide a roadmap for taxing
authorities. We use econometric methods to test our hypotheses. How would
you address this issue? By the way, the Illinois tax conference in October
has a panel session on FIN 48 disclosures, including the forecast
requirement, which suggests others are grappling with the informativeness of
these disclosures.

I ordered the book that Paul Williams suggested:
The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences. I hope I will have a better
understanding of your position after I read it.

Amy Dunbar
UConn

September 8, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Amy,

If you really want to understand the problem you’re
apparently wanting to study, read about how Warren Buffett changed the whole
outlook of a great econometrics/mathematics researcher (Janet Tavkoli). I’ve
mentioned this fantastic book before ---Dear Mr. Buffett. What opened her eyes is how Warren Buffet
built his vast, vast fortune exploiting the errors of the sophisticated
mathematical model builders when valuing derivatives (especially options)
where he became the writer of enormous option contracts (hundreds of
millions of dollars per contract). Warren Buffet dared to go where
mathematical models could not or would not venture when the real world
became too complicated to model. Warren reads financial statements better
than most anybody else in the world and has a fantastic ability to retain
and process what he’s studied. It’s impossible to model his mind.

I finally grasped what
Warren was saying. Warren has such a wide body of knowledge that he does not
need to rely on “systems.” . . . Warren’s vast knowledge of corporations and
their finances helps him identify derivatives opportunities, too. He only
participates in derivatives markets when Wall Street gets it wrong and
prices derivatives (with mathematical models) incorrectly. Warren tells
everyone that he only does certain derivatives transactions when they are
mispriced.

Wall Street derivatives
traders construct trading models with no clear idea of what they are doing.
I know investment bank modelers with advanced math and science degrees who
have never read the financial statements of the corporate credits they
model. This is true of some credit derivatives traders, too.Janet Tavakoli, Dear Mr. Buffett, Page 19

The part of my message
that you quoted was in the context of a bad debt estimation message. I don’t
think multivariate models in general work well in the context of bad debt
estimation because of the restrictive assumptions of the models (except in
some industries where bad debt losses are dominated by one or two really
good predictor variables). There is an exception in the case of the Altman,
Beaver, and Ohlson bankruptcy prediction models, but predicting bankruptcy
is in a different ball park than predicting defaults among 10 million rather
small accounts receivable.

As to multivariate models
as applied in TAR, JAR, and JAE I’ve no objection since the 1970s after
referees became much better at challenging model assumptions (in the 1960s
refereeing of econometrics models in accounting literature was often a
joke). "FANTASYLAND ACCOUNTING RESEARCH: Let's Make Pretend..." by Robert E.
Jensen, The Accounting Review,
Vol. 54, January 1979, 189-196.

The problem, as I see it,
is that there’s nothing wrong with our econometrics tool bag when applied to
problems where the tools fit the problem. The econometrics models (except
for nonlinear models) are relatively robust in most papers that do get
published these days.

Abstract
In a recent and influential empirical paper, Francis, LaFond, Olsson, and
Schipper (FLOS) [2005. The market pricing of accruals quality. Journal of
Accounting and Economics 39, 295–327] conclude that accruals quality (AQ) is
a priced risk factor. We explain that FLOS’ regressions examining a
contemporaneous relation between excess returns and factor returns do not
test the hypothesis that AQ is a priced risk factor. We conduct appropriate
asset-pricing tests for determining whether a potential risk factor explains
expected returns, and find no evidence that AQ is a priced risk factor.

We need to see the above disputes become the rule
rather than the exception!
Francis, LaFond, Olsson, and Schipper vigorously disagree with criticisms of
their work such that there are some interesting disputes that on occasion
arise in accountics research. For the most part, however, published papers
like this are rarely replicated such that errors and frauds go unchallenged
in most of the thousands of accountics papers that have been published in
the past four decades ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#Replication

The Corea, Guaya, and Verdib replication is a very,
very, very rare exception. I only wish there were more such disputes over
underlying modeling assumptions --- they should be extended to data quality
as well.

Now let me ask about your
FIN 48 tax disclosure study. Was there any independent replication to verify
that you did not make any significant data collection or modeling analysis
errors (you would be the last person in the world that I would suspect of
research fraud)? Do we accept your harvest as totally edible without a
single taste test by independent replicators?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#Replication

The editorial problem in TAR, JAR, and JAE is that they
commenced in the 1980s to ignore problems that could not be attacked with
accountics mathematics and statistical tool bags. This leaves out most
problems faced in the accounting profession since practitioners and standard
setters seldom (almost never) have copies of TAR, JAR, JAE, and even AH on
the table when they are dealing with client issues or standards issues. AH
evolved from its original charge to where articles in AH versus TAR are
virtually interchangeable. I repeat from a message yesterday:

Not everything that can be counted, counts.
And not everything that counts can be counted. Albert Einstein

"I understand your point,
Jim." He could not identify one issue that (accountics)
researchers had been able to "put to bed" after all that effort.P. Kothari, one of the Editors of JAE and a full professor at
MIT, as quoted by Jim Peters below.

Do we forecast? You bet. Do we have
confidence in our forecasts? Never! Confidence about a non-linear chaotic
system can only come in degrees, and even those degrees of confidence are
guesses. Not all hope is lost. There are times when it seems our ability to
predict is better than others. Thus we need to take advantage of it if we
see it. Trading ranges, pivot points, support and resistance, and the like
can help, and do help the trader.Michael Covel,
Trading Black Swans, September 2009 ---
http://www.michaelcovel.com/pdfs/swan.pdf

Most importantly of all in accountics is that the leading accounting
research journals for tenure, promotion, and performance evaluation in
academe are devoted to accountics paper. Normative methods, case studies,
and interviews are rarely used in studies published in such journals. The
following is a quotation from “An Analysis of the Evolution of Research
Contributions by The Accounting Review (TAR): 1926-2005,” by Jean L. Heck
and Robert E. Jensen, Accounting Historians Journal, Volume 34, No.
2, December 2007, Page 121.

Leading accounting professors lamented
TAR’s preference for rigor over relevancy [Zeff, 1978; Lee, 1997; and
Williams, 1985 and 2003]. Sundem [1987] provides revealing information about
the changed perceptions of authors, almost entirely from academe, who
submitted manuscripts for review between June 1982 and May 1986. Among the
1,148 submissions, only 39 used
archival (history) methods; 34 of those submissions were rejected.
Another 34
submissions used survey methods; 33 of those were rejected.And 100 submissions used traditional normative
(deductive) methods with 85 of those being rejected.
Except for a small set of 28 manuscripts classified as using “other” methods
(mainly descriptive empirical according to Sundem), the remaining larger
subset of submitted manuscripts used methods that Sundem [1987, p. 199]
classified these as follows:

292 General Empirical

172 Behavioral

135 Analytical modeling

119 Capital Market

97 Economic modeling

40 Statistical
modeling

29 Simulation

It is clear that by 1982, accounting researchers realized
that having mathematical or statistical analysis in TAR submissions made
accountics virtually a necessary, albeit not sufficient, condition for
acceptance for publication. It became increasingly difficult for a single
editor to have expertise in all of the above methods. In the late 1960s,
editorial decisions on publication shifted from the TAR editor alone to the
TAR editor in conjunction with specialized referees and eventually associate
editors [Flesher, 1991, p. 167]. Fleming et al. [2000, p. 45] wrote the
following:

The big change was in research
methods. Modeling and empirical methods became prominent during 1966-1985,
with analytical modeling and general empirical methods leading the way.
Although used to a surprising extent, deductive-type methods declined in
popularity, especially in the second half of the 1966-1985 period.

I think the emphasis highlighted in red
above demonstrates that "Methodological Confusion" reigns supreme in
accounting science as well as political science.

A couple of years
ago, P. Kothari, one of the Editors of JAE and a full professor at MIT,
visited the U. of Maryland to present a paper. In my private discussion with
him, I asked him to identify what he considered to the settled findings
associated with the last 30 years of capital markets research in accounting.
I pointed out that somewhere over half of all accounting research since Ball
and Brown fit into this category and I was curious as to what the effort had
added to Ball and Brown. That is, what conclusions have been drawn that
could be considered settled ground so that researchers could move on to
other topics. His response, and I quote, was "I understand your point, Jim."
He could not identify one issue that researchers had been able to "put to
bed" after all that effort.

P. Kothari's response
is to be expected. I have had similar responses from at least two ex-editors
of TAR; how appropriate a TLA! But who wants to bell the cats (or call off
the naked emperors' bluff)? Accounting academia knows which side of the
bread is buttered.

That you needed to
flaunt Kothari's resume to legitimise his vacuous response shows the
pathetic state of accounting academia.

If accounting
academia is not to be reduced to the laughing stock of accounting practice,
we better start listening to the problems that practice faces. How else can
we understand what we profess to "research"? We accounting academics have
been circling our wagons too long as a ploy to keep our wages arbitrarily
high.

In as much as we are
a profession, any academic on such a committee reduces the whole exercise to
a farce.

The more I read in the book Dear Mr. Buffet by Janet
Tavakoli, the more I see a parallel between investment bankers and
accountics researchers.

After almost 20 years working for Wall
Street firms in New York and London, I made my living running a
Chicago-based consulting business. My clients consider my expertise in
product they consume. I had written books on credit derivatives and
complex structured finance products, and financial institutions, hedge
funds, and sophisticated investors came to identify and solve potential
problems.Janet Tavokoli, Dear
Mr. Buffett (Wiley, 2009, Page 5)
Jensen Comment
Before she wrote Dear Mr. Buffett, her technical book on
Structural Finance & Collateralized Debt Obligations (Wiley) sat on
my desk for constant reference. Janet also runs her own highly
successful hedge fund. She won't disclose how big it is, but certain
clues make me think it is over $100 million with very wealthy clients.
Her professional life changed when she commenced to correspond with what
was the richest man in the world in 2008 (before he gave much of
his wealth to the Gates Charitable Foundation). He's also one of the
nicest and most transparent and most humble men in the world.
Warren Buffett ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett

Warren Buffett disproved the theory of
efficient markets that states that prices reflect all known information.
His shareholder letters, readily available (free) through Berkshire Hathaway's Web site, told
investors everything they needed to know about mortgage loan fraud,
mospriced credit derivatives, and overpriced securitizations, yet this
information hid in plain "site." Janet Tavokoli, Dear
Mr. Buffett (Wiley, 2009, Page 7)
Jensen Comment
Berkshire Hathaway ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkshire_Hathaway
Jensen Comment
This of course does not mean that on occasion Warren is not fallible.
Sometimes he does not heed his own advice, and rare occasions he loses
billions. But a billion or two to Warren Buffett is pocket change.

I finally grasped what
Warren was saying. Warren has such a wide body of knowledge that he does not
need to rely on “systems.” . . . Warren’s vast knowledge of corporations and
their finances helps him identify derivatives opportunities, too. He only
participates in derivatives markets when Wall Street gets it wrong and
prices derivatives (with mathematical models) incorrectly. Warren tells
everyone that he only does certain derivatives transactions when they are
mispriced. Janet Tavokoli,
Dear Mr. Buffett (Wiley, 2009, Page 19)

Why
investment bankers are like many accoutics professors
Wall Street derivatives traders construct trading models with no clear idea
of what they are doing. I know investment bank modelers with advanced math and science degrees
who have never read the financial statements of the corporate credits they
model. This is true of some credit derivatives traders, too.Janet Tavokoli, Dear Mr. Buffett (Wiley, 2009, Page 19)Jensen Comment
Especially note the above quotation when I refer to Reviewer A below.

Warren is aided by the fact that most
investment banks use sophisticated Monte Carlo models that misprice the
transactions. Some of the models rely on (credit) rating agency inputs,
and the rating agencies do a poor job of rating junk debt.Janet Tavokoli, Dear
Mr. Buffett (Wiley, 2009, Page 21)

Investment banks could put on the
same trades if they did fundamental analysis of the underlying
companies, but they are too busy
playing with correlation models.
Janet Tavokoli, Dear
Mr. Buffett (Wiley, 2009, Page 24)

Warren Buffett writes billions of dollars worth of put optionsWhen Warren sells a put buyer the right to make
him pay a specific price agreed today for the stock index (no matter
what the value 20 years from now), Warren receives a premium. Berkshire
Hathaway gets to invest that money for 20 years. Warren thinks the
buyer, the investment bank, is paying him too much . . . Furthermore,
Berkshire Hataway invests the premiums that will in all likelihood cover
anything he might need to pay out anything at all, since the stock index
is likely to be higher than today's value.Janet Tavokoli, Dear
Mr. Buffett (Wiley, 2009, Page 24)

My Four Telltale Quotations about accoutics professors
Although there are no longer any investment banks in the United States since
early 2009, how were investment bankers much like accountics researchers?
There is of course very little similarity now since investment bankers are
standing in unemployment lines and investment banks are out of business ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#InvestmentBanking

Accountics professors are still happily in business dancing behind tenure
walls and biased journal editors who still cannot see beyond accountics
research methodology.

I provide three quotations below that, I think, pretty well tell the
story of why many, certainly not all, accountics professors are pretty much
like investment bankers that were superior at mathematics and model building
and lousy at accounting and finance fundamentals. You, Amy, will probably
recall each of these quotations although they may not have sunk in like they
should've sunk in.

Quotation 1
Denny Beresford gave a 2005 luncheon speech at the annual meetings of the
American Accounting Association. Having been both a former executive partner
with E&Y and, for ten years, Chairman of the FASB before becoming an
accounting professor at the University of Georgia, Denny has lived all sides
of accounting --- practice, standard setting, and academe. In his speech
Denny very politely suggested that accountics professors should take and
interest in and learn a bit more about, gasp, accounting.

After he gave his speech, Denny submitted his speech for publication to
Accounting Horizons. Referee A flatly rejected the Denny's submission
for the following reasons:

The paper provides specific recommendations for
things that accounting academics should be doing to make the accounting
profession better. However (unless the author believes that academics'
time is a free good) this would presumably take academics' time away
from what they are currently doing. While following the author's advice
might make the accounting profession better, what is being made worse?
In other words, suppose I stop reading current academic research and
start reading news about current developments in accounting standards.
Who is made better off and who is made worse off by this reallocation of
my time? Presumably my students are marginally better off, because I can
tell them some new stuff in class about current accounting standards,
and this might possibly have some limited benefit on their careers. But
haven't I made my colleagues in my department worse off if they depend
on me for research advice, and haven't I made my university worse off if
its academic reputation suffers because I'm no longer considered a
leading scholar? Why does making the accounting profession better take
precedence over everything else an academic does with their time? Referee A's rejection letter,
Accounting Horizons, 2005

What riled me the most was the arrogance of Referee A. I read into it
that, whereas mathematicians and econometricians are true "scholars," other
accounting professors are little better than teachers of bookkeeping and
fairy tales. This is the same arrogant attitude held by previous investment
bankers trying to take advantage of Warren Buffet as their counterparties in
derivatives or other financial transactions.

Investment bankers and many accountics professors put on superior airs
because of their backgrounds in mathematics and science. To hell with
knowledge of fundamentals in accounting and finance apart from mathematical
models. To hell with reading and analyzing financial statements in great
depth. Accountics scholars, at least some of them who referee many
submissions to journals, don't waste their time on such mundane things.

Quotation 2
My second quotation laments that accounting education programs now often
have to pay the highest starting salaries for some graduates of accounting
doctoral programs who know very little accounting. Before she moved to
Wyoming, Linda Kidwell wrote a revealing message to the AECM listserv.

I cannot
find the exact quotation in my archives, but some years ago Linda Kidwell
complained that her university had recently hired a newly-minted graduate
from an accounting doctoral program who did not know any accounting. When
assigned to teach accounting courses, this new "accounting" professor was a
disaster since she knew nothing about the subjects she was assigned to
teach.

Quotation 3
In the year following his assignment as President of the American Accounting
Association Joel Demski asserted that research focused on the accounting
profession will become a "vocational virus" leading us away from the joys of
mathematics and the social sciences and the pureness of the scientific
academy:

Statistically there are a few youngsters who came to academia for the joy of
learning, who are yet relatively untainted by the
vocational virus.
I urge you to nurture your taste for learning, to follow your joy. That is
the path of scholarship, and it is the only one with any possibility of
turning us back toward the academy. Joel
Demski,
"Is Accounting an Academic Discipline? American Accounting Association
Plenary Session" August 9, 2006 ---
http://bear.cba.ufl.edu/demski/Is_Accounting_an_Academic_Discipline.pdf

Quotation 4
One of the very leading accountics professors is employed by the graduate
school at Northwestern University. Ron Dye's academic background is in
mathematics rather than accounting, and he's written some of the most
esoteric accountics research papers ever published in leading accounting
research journals.

Richard Sansing
from Dartmouth, on the AECM, occasionally stresses the importance of a
background in mathematics for students seeking fame and fortune as
accounting professors. Although I agree with Richard because of the
dominance of accountics in the accounting academy over the past four
decades, I don't think Richard anticipated the response he got from Ron Dye
when he (Richard Sansing) asked Ron Dye to comment about accountics research
and about the possible desirability of getting a doctorate in mathematics,
econometrics, psychometrics, statistics, etc. before becoming an accounting
assistant professor.

About the question: by and large, I think it is
a mistake for someone interested in pursuing an academic career in
accounting not to get a phd in accounting. If you look at the
"success" stories, there aren't many: most of the people who make a
post-phd transition fail. I think that happens for a couple reasons.

1. I think some of the people that transfer
late do it for the money, and aren't really all that interested in
accounting. While the $ are nice, it is impossible to think about $
when you are trying to come up with an idea, and anyway, you're
unlikely to come up with an idea unless you're really interested in
the subject.

2. I think, almost independent of the
field, unless you get involved in the field at an early age, for
some reason it becomes very hard to develop good intuition for the
area - which is a second reason good problems are often not
generated by "crossovers."

The bigger thing - not related to the question
you raise - but maybe you could add to the discussion is that there are,
as far as I can tell, not a lot of new ideas being put forth by
anyone in accounting nowadays (with the possible exception of John
Dickhaut's neuro stuff). In most fields, the youngsters are supposed to
come up with the new problems, techniques, etc., but I see a lot more
mimicry than innovation among newly minted phds now.

Anyway, for what it's worth.... Ron Dye, Northwestern
University

I think Ron Dye is being extremely
blunt and extremely honest. What really strikes me is that four decades of
accountics research as pretty much evolved into sterile research where "not
a lot of new ideas are being put forth" by accountics professors.

What the big problem is with
accountics research is that it is too restrictive as to what problems are
taken on by accountics researchers, what papers are written for submission
to the leading academic accounting research journals, and the high level of
mathematics required for admission/progression in an accountancy doctoral
program.

What a boring time it is in accountics
research where virtually nothing comes out that is deemed worth replicating
and verifying.

Accountics researchers, however,
should thank the heavens that they did not become, like those "correlation
investment bankers," counterparties in derivatives with Warren Buffet.
It's far better to be among the highest paid professors in a university
while dancing behind the protective walls of tenure.

I will probably send out a lot more
tidbits from my hero Janet Tavaloli (she became more of a hero after she
delved into the mind of Warren Buffett).

Having been very busy at my "day job" the last few
days, I've missed much of this thread, but I'd like to comment on something
Ron Dye said in the excerpt below about "new ideas." I apologize if my
thoughts are not fully developed, so I'll label them observations or
questions.

How many new PhDs actually have any experience in
accounting or of thinking about accounting issues outside of their
undergraduate degree program?

Although I'm generally on the side of the non-accountics
folks in the debate about relevant research, I also believe it's difficult
for someone to come up with new and interesting questions about which to do
even accountics research if that person hasn't spent time thinking about the
issues of financial reporting (or management decisions-making, etc).

I don't see the problem raised by Ron as one
related to the methodology used for the research. Rather my observation is a
lack of experience about the issues that cause us to want/need some research
in the first place.

Thoughts?

Pat

September 10, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Pat,

Gary Sundem,
while editor of TAR and while AAA President, made a major point of saying
that the accounting profession should not look to empirical research for
"new theories."

The following is a quote from the 1993
President’s Message of Gary Sundem, President’s Message. Accounting
Education News 21 (3). 3.

Although empirical
scientific method has made many positive contributions to accounting
research, it is not the method that is likely to generate new theories,
though it will be useful in testing them. For example, Einstein’s theories
were not developed empirically, but they relied on understanding the
empirical evidence and they were tested empirically. Both the development
and testing of theories should be recognized as acceptable accounting
research.

If we ever had an accounting Einstein in the past four
decades, that accounting Einstein probably could’ve never published in TAR,
JAR, JAE, CAR, or even AH (in later years). Hence, we do not look to these
“leading” research journals of the accounting academy for the development of
new theories that perhaps cannot be immediately tested.

When I was
Program Director for an AAA annual meeting in NYC, I arranged for Joel
Demski to be on a plenary session (actually a debate with Bob Kaplan). Among
other things I asked Joel to identify at least one seminal and creative idea
from the academy of accountics researchers that impacted on the practitioner
world. In his speech, Joel suggested Dollar-Value Lifo. Later I inspired
accounting historian Dale Flesher investigate the origins of Dollar-Value
Lifo.

Contrary to a recent
statement in this forum, Dollar-Value Lifo (DVL) was not developed by a
professor. The father of DVL was Herbert T. McAnly, who retired in 1964 as a
partner at Ernst & Ernst after 44 years with the firm. Throughout his
career, McAnly was known as "Mr. LIFO."

Although he did not
develop LIFO, which had been around for decades in the form of the
base-stock method, he did develop DVL after the Internal Revenue began
accepting LIFO from all types of companies. The Treasury would probably
never have agreed to allow all companies to use LIFO (in 1939) had they been
able to prognosticate McAnly's idea. He first described the concept in an
address delivered at the Accounting Clinic and the Central States Accounting
Conference in Chicago in May 1941. His concept was finally accepted by the
IRS following the Hutzler Brothers Co. case in 1947 (8 TC 14 (1947)). He
later worked with the Treasury Department trying to get more practical
regulations relating to LIFO.

If we ever had an accounting Einstein
in the past four decades, that accounting Einstein probably could’ve never
published in TAR, JAR, JAE, CAR, or even AH (in later years). Hence, we do
not look to these “leading” research journals of the accounting academy for
the development of new theories that perhaps cannot be immediately tested.
Bob Jensen

"I understand your point,
Jim." He could not identify one issue that (accountics)
researchers had been able to "put to bed" after all that effort.P. Kothari, one of the Editors of JAE and a full professor at
MIT, as quoted by Jim Peters in an AECM message.

Amy,
Why don't you ask the protagonists what they are doing and why?
Anthropolotgists and sociologists do it all the time. At the AAA meeting in
NYC I used an analogy that Sylvia Earle provided at an Emerging Issues Forum
here at NC State a number of years ago. She is an oceanographer who holds
all the records for time and depth spent under water by a woman. She
described her discipline before and after the invention of SCUBA and other
forms (bathosphere) of deep diving technology. Before the ability to immerse
in the ocean environment she likened her research to being in a balloon over
NYC throwing a basket through the clouds and dragging it along the streets.

From the bits and pieces (much of which was simply
the detritus of life in the city) you had to infer what life was actually
like in a place you couldn't see. What underwater breathing technology did
for her field was absolutely revolutionary because, as she said, you could
actually be in the life of the sea. Obviously what we thought was the case
from the bits of stuff retrieved turned out to be woefully inadequate for
developing a rich understanding of oceanic life.

Accountics research is still little more than
throwing a basket over the side. It is observing at a distance the detritus
(bits of accounting data that float to the surface in the form of public
archives) and inferring what must be happening. This is further limited by
the invariable assumption that whatever is happening must be economic!
Little wonder we have made so little progress.

Ackerloff and Shiller (Animal Spirits) provide an
interesting, two dimensional matrix for understanding human behavior (they
are still economists, but at least Shiller's wife is a social psychologist
who has had a very positive influence on his thinking): One dimension is
Motives -- economic and non-economic (people are likely more non-economic
than economic) and Responses -- rational and irrational. Of the four boxes,
accountics research has confined itself to just one: motives must be
economic and responses must be rational. Seventy five percent of the terrain
of human social behavior is completely ignored.

Added to Bob's shortcomings to accountics research
I would add one more. Sue Ravenscroft and I have a working paper trying to
sort out the inadequacies of "decsion usefulness" as both a policy criterion
and a research objective. One problem with accounting research is that the
accountics approach privileges exclusively algorithmic knowledge -- behavior
that can be modeled (so Wayne Gretzky's famous observation, "I skate to
where the puck is going to be" is beyond understanding). Much of this
research utilizes accounting data as a principal source of measurement. The
problem is that though accountants produce numbers, they don't produce
Quantities, which is essential for performing mathematical operations.

Brian West discusses this extensively in his
Notable Contribution Award winner Professionalism and Accounting Rules. To
perform even the simplest arithmetic operation of addition the numbers you
add must represent quantities of a like type. I can add a coffee cup to a
Volkswagon and claim I have two, but two of what?

Accounting numbers are what Gillies describes as
operational numbers, i.e., numbers obtained by performing operations,
analogous to grading an exam. As West points out financial statements today
consist of numbers developed by performing operations that require cost,
unamortized cost, lower-of-cost or market (with floor and ceiling rules),
exit market values, present values, and, now, "fair" value. When you add all
of these up what do you have? Good question. You have a number, but you most
certainly do not have a quantity. So when an accountics researcher develops
a 20 variable regression model where the dependent variable and at least
half of the independent variables are the operational numbers produced by
accountants (numbers, not quantities), what could the results possibly MEAN.

It is a false precision of the most egregious
kind (GIGO?). In your study you will use operational numbers and assert this
is what my measures mean, but you have no way of knowing if this describes
the actual context in which the decisions were actually made (you are
looking at the stuff from the basket). What it means to you isn't
necessarily what it meant to the actual people who made these decisions.

My issue with so much accountics research is that
it means what the researcher chooses to have it mean; the researcher assigns
the meaning, but to understand what is going on with human beings it is
important to know what their behavior means to them.

And in accountics research this remains a mystery.
A couple of other books (once you finish Shapiro"s) are by Bent Flyvbjerg:
Rationality and Power and Making Social Science Matter. In the latter he
discusses the work of Dreyfus and Dreyfus on what they call "a-rational"
behavior (what Gretzsky is doing when he skates to where the puck is going
to be). See also Gerd Gigerenzer, Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the
Unconscious..

Statistical methods are not inherently faulty. But they can be, and far too
frequently are, misused. So, to turn your metaphor on its head, much accountics
econometrics work is more like spraying manure in a perfumed room, or more like
a skunk spraying in a perfumed room.

Statistical methods are used for classifying, associating, predicting,
inferring (causally as well as associatively), organising, and learning. It is
important to always keep in mind in which context you are using statistics.

1.
In the accountics stuff I am familiar with, determining association is the
avowed objective, but the language subtly takes a predictive turn in
discussions. The reason usually is the positivist dogma having to do with
absence of causation in a naive positivist's lexicon.

I have been stunned by well known accounticians professing that we do not study
causes because there are no statistical methods for causal inference. And to the
last person, these folks have not heard of modern statistical tools for the
study of causation in statistics.

Ignorance is bliss in this wonderland. Social scientists, however, have used
them for a long time. Theological commitments are dangerous for ANY "science".

2.
Classification is the first step in learning. It is only VERY recently that
accounting folks have started talking about the use of classification by use of
clustering, support vector machines, neural nets, etc., but most of these
discussions take place in non-mainstream contexts.

3.
Many of the techniques in 2 are nowadays considered part of the field of machine
learning, a hybrid between statistics and computing. I am sure one of these
days, when they have become stale elsewhere,They’ll be used in accounting.
Mainstream accountics academics are far too conservative to accept any
statistical method unless they have been certified stale.

4.
Often, in conversations, accountics folks revert to counterfactual
statements.That is natural in the sciences. Underlying such statements are
usually causal inferences. It is in this context that I had made observation 1
above. Building a better mousetrap is a legitimate objective of sciences, and
therefore predictive models are essential component of any science. Accountics'
theological commitment to positivist dogma makes them schizophrenic in that they
cannot admit causality without jeopardising their philosophical suppositions and
yet cannot ignore it if they are to maintain their credibility as scientists.

As to some work in these areas of statistics, any list I prepare would include
the following books.

As David Bartholomae observes, “We make a huge
mistake if we don’t try to articulate more publicly what it is we value in
intellectual work. We do this routinely for our students — so it should not be
difficult to find the language we need to speak to parents and legislators.” If
we do not try to find that public language but argue instead that we are not
accountable to those parents and legislators, we will only confirm what our
cynical detractors say about us, that our real aim is to keep the secrets of our
intellectual club to ourselves. By asking us to spell out those secrets and
measuring our success in opening them to all, outcomes assessment helps make
democratic education a reality. Gerald Graff, "Assessment Changes
Everything," Inside Higher Ed, February 21, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/02/21/graff
Gerald Graff is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago
and president of the Modern Language Association. This essay is adapted from a
paper he delivered in December at the MLA annual meeting, a version of which
appears on the MLA’s Web site and is reproduced here with the association’s
permission. Among Graff’s books are Professing Literature, Beyond the
Culture Wars and Clueless in Academe: How School Obscures the Life of the Mind.

The consensus report, which was approved by the
group’s international board of directors, asserts that it is vital when
accrediting institutions to assess the “impact” of faculty members’ research on
actual practices in the business world.

A growing number of journal publishers are checking
papers for possible plagiarism as part of their review process.

That's according to the makers of CrossCheck, a
service that checks articles submitted to scholarly journals against
already-published work for possible plagiarism. Over 80 publishing companies
have adopted CrossCheck since its debut in June 2008,
Nature News reported,and the service's increasing
use has sniffed out high rates of plagiarism in the submissions to some
journals.

The anti-plagiarism service uses software from
iParadigms, the California-based company behind Turnitin, which checks
student papers for plagiarized work. CrossCheck compares submitted materials
with the full text of the 25.5 million articles in its database, a
collection of articles pooled by the publishers that subscribe to the
service.

The service, which has been adopted by publishers
including Nature Publishing and Sage, has turned up plenty of copycat work,
including articles that would have been published otherwise. Taylor &
Francis, a publishing company based in the United Kingdom, found that 23
percent of submissions to one of its journals were rejected because they
contained plagiarism,
Nature News reported.(The journals that were
selected to test CrossCheck had seen incidents of plagiarism in the past.)

After using CrossCheck on submissions, one journal
from Mary Ann Liebert, a publisher based in New Rochelle, N.Y., rejected
about 7 percent of articles that had been peer-reviewed and accepted for
publication, said Adam Etkin, assistant vice president and the director of
online and Internet services for the publishing company. On the other hand,
some of the publisher's other journals, out of the dozen or so that have
begun using CrossCheck, have not uncovered any incidents of plagiarism.

After CrossCheck has detected passages that are
identical or similar to work that has already been published, journal
editors must decide what to do next.

This depends on the incident's severity and intent,
Mr. Etkin said. CrossCheck sometimes flags passages as plagiarized when they
have been improperly cited, and, in some instances, there are few ways to
describe methods or materials differently. Editors at his company's journals
sometimes contact authors to ask them to revise their work or correct their
citations.

The consequences are much more severe when
plagiarists are caught: Authors have been banned from Mary Ann Liebert's
journals after they were caught plagiarizing—in one instance, for three
years. In some cases, the violations have been reported to the author’s
institution.

For anyone who spent time in public practice, the “timesheet”
was both a good thing and a bad thing! It helped you keep track of what you
accomplished (and what you didn’t). I have often wondered whether
maintaining a timesheet would be a useful exercise for a faculty member.

A couple of years ago, I discovered a personal
timesheet program callediZeptodeveloped by
Shine Technologies, an Australian
company. I started using iZepto to keep track of my time. iZepto is
particularly useful when preparing my annual faculty activitity report.

iZepto is a Web 2.0 hosted software service. There
is nothing to download except reports that you setup and print
periodically. It is easy to tailor to personal needs. Classify your
activities in ways that make sense to you.

iZepto is free for 1 to 3 users. Great price! For
iPhone users, there is a freeiPhone applicationthat you can
download from the iPhone App Store. What could be more useful?

iZepto is a great personal productivity tool. Take
a look. Give it a try.

The Islamic finance industry has often battled
with the question: How Islamic is Islamic banking?

The question's pertinence was raised in March last
year, when Sheikh Muhammad Taqi Usmani, of the Accounting and Auditing
Organization for Islamic Finance Institutions (AAOIFI), a Bahrain-based
regulatory institution that sets standards for the global industry, said
that 85% of Sukuk, or Islamic bonds, were un-Islamic.

Usmani is the granddaddy of modern-day Islamic
finance, so having him make this statement is synonymous with Adam Smith
saying that free-markets are inefficient.

Because Sukuk underpin the modern-day Islamic
financial system, one of its pre-eminent proponents arguing that the
epicentre of the system was flawed sent shockwaves through the industry.

It also gave ammunition to the many critics who see
Islamic finance as an industry more driven by cultural identity than
practical problem solving: as a hodgepodge of incoherent, incomplete,
impractical and irrelevant ideas.

Recognisable products

The products that modern-day Islamic bankers have
created are very similar to conventional products.

This immediately creates a problem for Islamic
banks, as conventional banks charge borrowers an interest rate through which
they can reward their depositors and make some profit for being the broker.

With interest ruled out it is harder to make money.

The modern Islamic banker has found a way around
this prohibition, however.

As in many Islamic products, the bank enters a
partnership with its depositors and invests his money in a Sharia compliant
business.

The profit from this investment is then shared
between the depositor and the bank after a set time.

In many cases this "profit rate" is competitive
with the conventional banking system's interest rate for savers.

Lease agreements

Alternatively, an Islamic banker might enter into a
lease agreement for a car or a house with an individual.

The bank would buy a vehicle outright and then
lease it back to the person who wanted it, over a time period that would
ensure that the capital was repaid and the bank made a profit.

Alternatively the bank would enter into a
partnership with a person wanting to buy a house. The bank would buy 70% of
the house, the individual 30%.

The bank then rents its share of the house back to
the individual until the house is fully paid for.

The bank makes a profit on the rent, which would be
higher than equivalent rents in the area, but on an annualised percentage
basis, would look very much like a conventional mortgage interest rate.

To the casual observer, a spade is a spade.

Whether the product is dressed up in Arabic
terminology, such as Mudarabah, or Ijarah, if it looks and feels like a
mortgage, it is a mortgage and to say anything else is semantics.

Sophisticated finance

The potential wealth locked up in oil-rich Gulf
states encouraged the conventional banks to enter Islamic finance.

HSBC established the Amanah Islamic Finance brand
in 1998 and Deutsche Bank, Citi, UBS and Barclays quickly joined the fray,
all offering interest-free products for wealthy Arabs.

However, this new generation of Islamic bankers had
cut their teeth in the City and Wall Street, and were used to creating
sophisticated financial products.

They often bumped heads with the Sharia scholars
who authorised their products as Sharia compliant.

However, these bankers had a way of dealing with
this, as one investment banker based in Dubai, working for a major Western
financial organisation explains:

"We create the same type of products that we do for
the conventional markets. We then phone up a Sharia scholar for a Fatwa
[seal of approval, confirming the product is Shari'ah compliant].

"If he doesn't give it to us, we phone up another
scholar, offer him a sum of money for his services and ask him for a Fatwa.
We do this until we get Sharia compliance. Then we are free to distribute
the product as Islamic."

No consensus

This "Fatwa shopping", which was carried out by
some institutions, brings us back to the Sharia scholars.

Even these scholars do not agree all the time,
which means that in some cases a product is deemed Sharia compliant in one
market and not in another.

This is especially the case with Malaysian
products, which are often deemed not Sharia complaint in the more austere
Gulf.

"Often no rulings exist for modern day problems,
such as use of narcotics," Alamad explains.

"In Islam intoxication by wine is forbidden, but at
the time of the Prophet Mohammed there was no crack cocaine."

Modern scholars had to interpret the rules on
intoxication, and the consensus was that crack should also be forbidden to
Muslims, as it is a dangerous intoxicant.

"This is how we make rulings, whether in finance or
societal," Alamad says. "The consensus rules, which usually will become
mandatory for all Muslims to follow, but there are some opinions and
sometimes scholars are not in the consensus."

Banking is banking

This makes it more important to be in the
consensus, and so getting a favourable ruling from a leading Sharia scholar
is important for a product manager.

That is why the top scholars can earn so much money
- often six-figure sums for each ruling.

The most creative scholars are the ones in the most
demand, says Tarek El Diwany, analyst at London-based Islamic financial
consultancy Zest Advisory.

"To date, most Islamic financiers have been looking
at examples of financing in Islamic history and figuring out how to apply
them to today's financial products."

If you follow the entertainment business at all,
you're probably well aware of "Hollywood accounting," whereby very, very,
very few entertainment products are technically "profitable," even as they
earn studios millions of dollars. A couple months ago, the Planet Money
folks did a great episode explaining how this works in very simple terms.
The really, really, really simplified version is that Hollywood sets up a
separate corporation for each movie with the intent that this corporation
will take on losses. The studio then charges the "film corporation" a huge
fee (which creates a large part of the "expense" that leads to the loss).
The end result is that the studio still rakes in the cash, but for
accounting purposes the film is a money "loser" -- which matters quite a bit
for anyone who is supposed to get a cut of any profits.

For example, a bunch of you sent in the example of
how Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, under "Hollywood accounting,"
ended up with a $167 million "loss," despite taking in $938 million in
revenue. This isn't new or surprising, but it's getting attention because
the income statement for the movie was leaked online, showing just how
Warner Bros. pulled off the accounting trick:

In that statement, you'll notice the "distribution
fee" of $212 million dollars. That's basically Warner Bros. paying itself to
make sure the movie "loses money." There are some other fun tidbits in there
as well. The $130 million in "advertising and publicity"? Again, much of
that is actually Warner Bros. paying itself (or paying its own
"properties"). $57 million in "interest"? Also to itself for "financing" the
film. Even if we assume that only half of the "advertising and publicity"
money is Warner Bros. paying itself, we're still talking about $350 million
that Warner Bros. shifts around, which get taken out of the "bottom line" in
the movie accounting.

Now, that's all fascinating from a general business
perspective, but now it appears that Hollywood Accounting is coming under
attack in the courtroom... and losing. Not surprisingly, your average juror
is having trouble coming to grips with the idea that a movie or television
show can bring in hundreds of millions and still "lose" money. This week,
the big case involved a TV show, rather than a movie, with the famed
gameshow Who Wants To Be A Millionaire suddenly becoming "Who Wants To Hide
Millions In Profits." A jury found the whole "Hollywood Accounting"
discussion preposterous and awarded Celador $270 million in damages from
Disney, after the jury believed that Disney used these kinds of tricks to
cook the books and avoid having to pay Celador over the gameshow, as per
their agreement.

On the same day, actor Don Johnson won a similar
lawsuit in a battle over profits from the TV show Nash Bridges, and a jury
awarded him $23 million from the show's producer. Once again, the jury was
not at all impressed by Hollywood Accounting.

With these lawsuits exposing Hollywood's sneakier
accounting tricks, and finding them not very convincing, a number of
Hollywood studios may face a glut of upcoming lawsuits over similar deals on
properties that "lost" money while making millions. It's why many of the
studios are pretty worried about the rulings. Of course, these recent
rulings will be appealed, and a jury ruling might not really mean much in
the long run. Still, for now, it's a fun glimpse into yet another way that
Hollywood lies with numbers to avoid paying people what they owe (while at
the same sanctimoniously insisting in the press and to politicians that
they're all about getting content creators paid what they're due).

Every night at bedtime, former Celtic Ray Williams
locks the doors of his home: a broken-down 1992 Buick, rusting on a back
street where he ran out of everything.

The 10-year NBA veteran formerly known as “Sugar
Ray’’ leans back in the driver’s seat, drapes his legs over the center
console, and rests his head on a pillow of tattered towels. He tunes his
boom box to gospel music, closes his eyes, and wonders.

Williams, a generation removed from staying in
first-class hotels with Larry Bird and Co. in their drive to the 1985 NBA
Finals, mostly wonders how much more he can bear. He is not new to poverty,
illness, homelessness. Or quiet desperation.

In recent weeks, he has lived on bread and water.

“They say God won’t give you more than you can
handle,’’ Williams said in his roadside sedan. “But this is wearing me
out.’’

A former top-10 NBA draft pick who once scored 52
points in a game, Williams is a face of big-time basketball’s underclass. As
the NBA employs players whose average annual salaries top $5 million,
Williams is among scores of retired players for whom the good life vanished
not long after the final whistle.

Dozens of NBA retirees, including Williams and his
brother, Gus, a two-time All-Star, have sought bankruptcy protection.

“Ray is like many players who invested so much of
their lives in basketball,’’ said Mike Glenn, who played 10 years in the
NBA, including three with Williams and the New York Knicks. “When the
dividends stopped coming, the problems started escalating. It’s a cold
reality.’’

Williams, 55 and diabetic, wants the titans of
today’s NBA to help take care of him and other retirees who have plenty of
time to watch games but no televisions to do so. He needs food, shelter,
cash for car repairs, and a job, and he believes the multibillion-dollar
league and its players should treat him as if he were a teammate in
distress.

One thing Williams especially wants them to know:
Unlike many troubled ex-players, he has never fallen prey to drugs, alcohol,
or gambling.

“When I played the game, they always talked about
loyalty to the team,’’ Williams said. “Well, where’s the loyalty and
compassion for ex-players who are hurting? We opened the door for these guys
whose salaries are through the roof.’’

Unfortunately for Williams, the NBA-related
organizations best suited to help him have closed their checkbooks to him.
The NBA Legends Foundation, which awarded him grants totaling more than
$10,000 in 1996 and 2004, denied his recent request for help. So did the NBA
Retired Players Association, which in the past year gave him two grants
totaling $2,000.

This sad case is consistent
with the research showing that lottery winners get a big initial boost in
happiness but return to a set-point of happiness over time. So that, in the
long run, winning the lottery makes 0 difference in happiness. E.g.,
http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/invest/forbes/P95294.asp

The cultural myth is that
large amounts of $ bring happiness -- which is true for the initial receipt
of $. But research suggests that big $$$ brings long-term happiness only if
the $ comes with considerable wisdom regarding managing one's own desires,
and, knowledge (personal or purchased) regarding how to preserve the $.

Hence, the simple standard
utility function of $ = utility = happiness is a special case that only
holds for the short-term. The equation for the long-term perhaps should be
modified to be something like $ + knowledge + wisdom = long-term happiness.
This would be consistent with George Kinder's model of money maturity:

Abstract:
People
think by analogies and comparisons. Such way of thinking, termed coarse
thinking by Mullainathan et al [Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 2008] is
intuitively very appealing. We derive a new option pricing formula based on
the notion that the market consists of coarse thinkers as well as rational
investors. The new formula, called the behavioral option pricing formula is
a generalization of the Black-Scholes formula. The new formula not only
provides explanations for the implied volatility skew and term structure
puzzles in equity index options but is also consistent with the observed
negative relationship between contemporaneous equity price shocks and
implied volatility.

Jensen Comment
Since valuation of options is required under FAS 133 and FAS 123-R, I think many
intermediate accounting instructors are still leaving their students with the
impression that the Black-Scholes formula is the appropriate alternative for
valuing options. It is a poor valuation model for FAS 133 and a really lousy
valuation model for FAS 123-R where employees have great aversion to the
possibility that their stock options will tank out of the money.

I've no thoughts yet on the appropriateness of the Siddiqi model proposed
above, but for years when I was still teaching accounting theory I made my
students learn the lattice model.

The
problem in theory and practice is that the Black-Scholes model that is popular
in financial markets for purchased options is not especially well suited for
employee stock options where employees tend to have greater fears that option
values will tank before expiration dates. It's a little like having to put your
salary in suspension and then losing it before you get it back. As a result the
lattice model described below may be more approprate.

"How to
“Excel” at Options Valuation," by Charles P. Baril, Luis Betancourt, and
John W. Briggs, Journal of Accountancy, December 2005 ---
http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/dec2005/baril.htmThis is one of the best articles for accounting
educators on issues of option valuation!

Research
shows that employees value options at a small fraction of their Black-Scholes
value, because of the possibility that they will vest underwater. ---
http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/3014835

Deloitte & Touche (USA) has updated its book of guidance on FASB Statement No.
123(R) Share-Based Payment: A Roadmap to Applying the Fair Value Guidance to
Share-Based Payment Awards (PDF 2220k).
This second edition reflects all authoritative guidance on FAS 123(R) issued as
of 28 April 2006. It includes over 60 new questions and answers, particularly in
the areas of earnings per share, income tax accounting, and liability
classification. Our interpretations incorporate the views in SEC Staff
Accounting Bulletin Topic 14 "Share-Based Payment" (SAB 107), as well as
subsequent clarifications of EITF Topic No. D-98 "Classification and Measurement
of Redeemable Securities" (dealing with mezzanine equity treatment). The
publication contains other resource materials, including a GAAP accounting and
disclosure checklist. Note that while FAS 123 is similar to IFRS 2 Share-based Payment,
there are some measurement differences that areDescribed Here.

Trying
to get a group of people together can be a challenge, even in our age of
connectivity. It is nice to know that there's a program like TeamViewer
which can be of great assistance. The application is designed to allow
screen-sharing and file-transfers between business partners and others.

Visitors can share their access code with others to let them remotely access
a computer or share screens. This version is compatible with computers
running Windows 98 and newer, Max OS X 10.4 and newer, and Linux.

With
this version of its popular product, AMG Anti-Virus is offering a few new
notable highlights. For one, visitors can use the full-featured scheduling
utility for automating tasks and checking for new definitions.

This
version of Anti-Virus also includes new anti-phishing detection techniques
and an up-to-date link scanner. Users running Windows 2000 and newer as well
as Linux will be able to use this application.

So maybe you have a clutch of photos or documents
that would like to transform into a digital collection? Omeka can help you
out with that. This web-publishing platform allows users to set up an online
exhibition quickly, and it is designed with non-IT specialists in mind. The
program also has features and plugins that information science specialists
will enjoy, including Dublin Core metadata standards and customizable item
fields. This version requires a web server with a Linux operating system,
Apache HTTP server, MySQL version 5.0 or greater, PHP version 5.2.4 or
greater, and ImageMagick. If users are interested in installing Omeka in a
VMWare virtual machine running Ubuntu Linux on Mac and Windows desktop
platforms, instructions are also provided.

The HardCopy Pro program is a great way to capture
screens of interest that might be of later use in a professional or
recreational setting. Visitors can use the program to capture rectangular
screen areas, and then manipulate the images via a cropping tool.
Additionally, they can use the application to save the images in a variety
of file formats. This version is free for 30 days, and it is compatible with
computers running Windows XP and newer.

A draft paper by Harvard graduate student James Lee
(student of Steve Pinker; I'd love to post the paper here but don't know yet
if that's OK) got me interested in the work of statistical learning pioneerJudea Pearl.
I found the essay
Bayesianism and Causality, or, why I am only a half-Bayesian(excerpted below) a concise, and provocative,
introduction to his ideas.

Pearl is correct to say that humans think in terms of
causal models, rather than in terms of correlation. Our brains favor simple,
linear narratives. The effectiveness of physics is a consequence of the fact
that descriptions of natural phenomena are compressible into simple causal
models. (Or, perhaps it just looks that way to us ;-)

Judea Pearl: I
turned Bayesian in 1971, as soon as I began reading Savage’s monograph
The Foundations of Statistical Inference [Savage, 1962]. The arguments
were unassailable: (i) It is plain silly to ignore what we know, (ii) It
is natural and useful to cast what we know in the language of
probabilities, and (iii) If our subjective probabilities are erroneous,
their impact will get washed out in due time, as the number of
observations increases.

Thirty years later, I am still a devout Bayesian in the sense of (i),
but I now doubt the wisdom of (ii) and I know that, in general, (iii) is
false. Like most Bayesians, I believe that the knowledge we carry in our
skulls, be its origin experience, schooling or hearsay, is an invaluable
resource in all human activity, and that combining this knowledge with
empirical data is the key to scientific enquiry and intelligent
behavior. Thus, in this broad sense, I am a still Bayesian. However, in
order to be combined with data, our knowledge must first be cast in some
formal language, and what I have come to realize in the past ten years
is that the language of probability is not suitable for the task; the
bulk of human knowledge is organized around causal, not probabilistic
relationships, and the grammar of probability calculus is insufficient
for capturing those relationships. Specifically, the building blocks of
our scientific and everyday knowledge are elementary facts such as “mud
does not cause rain” and “symptoms do not cause disease” and those
facts, strangely enough, cannot be expressed in the vocabulary of
probability calculus. It is for this reason that I consider myself only
a half-Bayesian. ...

Statistics Lesson: Spanking is a cause of lower IQ? U.S. children who were spanked had lower IQs four years
later than those not spanked, researchers found. University of New Hampshire
Professor Murray Straus, who is presenting the findings Friday at the 14th International Conference on Violence, Abuse
and Trauma, in San Diego, called the study
"groundbreaking." "The results of this research have major implications for the
well being of children across the globe," Straus said in a statement. "It is
time for psychologists to recognize the need to help parents end the use of
corporal punishment and incorporate that objective into their teaching and
clinical practice." "How often parents spanked
made a difference. The more spanking the, the slower the development of the
child's mental ability," Straus said. "But even small amounts of spanking made a
difference.""Study: Spanking linked to lower IQ," Breitbart, September
25, 2009 ---
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=upiUPI-20090925-121520-9596&show_article=1&catnum=0
Jensen Comment
I think Straus was frequently spanked as a child. Could it be that lower IQ
students get more frustrated and are inclined toward greater degrees of misbehavior?

Dear Dad
Berlin is wonderful, people are nice and I really like it here, but Dad, I
am a bit ashamed to arrive at my college with my pure-gold Ferrari 599 GTB
when all my teachers and many fellow students travel by train.

My dear loving son
Ten billion US Dollars have just been transferred to your account. Please
stop embarrassing us. Go and get yourself a train too.
Love, your Dad

AECM (Educators)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/aecm/AECM is an email Listserv list which
provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software
which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the
college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and
peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets,
multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base
programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc

CPAS-L (Practitioners)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of
all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an
unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments,
ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed.
Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L
or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for
a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional
accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or
education. Others will be denied access.

Yahoo
(Practitioners)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA.
This can be anything from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ
initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA.